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I've been co-teaching a short class on synthetic biology this spring through the MIT High School Studies Program (HSSP). The program is awesome, I took classes through a similar MIT program as a nerdy middle schooler and have had a great time teaching the past few weeks (if you're in the Boston…

Christina Agapakis joins us from the ever-inspired Oscillator, her synthetic biology blog at ScienceBlogs. When she’s not reshuffling DNA sequences in her lab at Harvard, she’s usually there making Lady Gaga video spoofs, or something obvious like that.
I'm almost embarrassed for eleven year old me…

A shout out to Vincent Caprio for posting this interview with Larry Bock and blogging about the festival on his website. Thanks for helping us get the word out!
NanoBusiness Alliance Interview - Larry Bock, Executive Director, USA Science & Engineering FestivalPosted on September 1st, 2010…

Shout out to CrazyEngineers for a recent interview with Festival Director Larry Bock
Larry Bock - Celebrating Science & Engineering
CEans,
Mr. Larry Bock is the Founder of Nanosys Inc. He is a General Partner of CW Ventures, a $100M life sciences venture capital fund, and a Special Limited…

Hi Christina, your blog is so cool (also you are so cute ^_^)
i have a question but i don't know where i have to put it, so I will put it here (forgive me if it is the wrong place).
I am an electrical engineer (well, I'm still an undergrad student so I'm "a project" of an engineer ^^),I read a lot of stuff about synthetic biology and i loved it, But still don't know how and where should i start SO my question is : What are the minimum requirements (basic biological knowledge, equipments, learning resources,..... etc) that i have to have to start a successful SynBio project? please let the answer be in points and detailed as possible.
BTW, I live in Egypt and you're welcome anytime :)

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Oscillator is moving to the brand new Scientific American network! I'm excited for this new opportunity and sad to be leaving my old home here. I want to give many special thanks to SEED people past and present for their help and support, in particular Nikki, Erin, Greg, Evan, and Wes. And of…

I got a long email from one of the authors of the skull measuring study and I want to make some clarifications to my previous post. It seems that I was not as clear and thorough as I could have been in my argument.
First, my sincere apologies to all physical anthropologists and other researchers…

It's not every day that you read about measuring skulls in the contemporary scientific literature. It's kind of a quaintly old-timey, quaintly racist kind of thing to do. But here we are, with a brand new paper about skull measuring in PLoS Biology. Already quite a few blog-words have been…

Last month I wrote about my friend Devin Burrill's paper about synthetic memory in yeast cells. There were a lot of really interesting questions left in the comments, and I asked Devin if she would write a guest post to answer them. She agreed and here it is, answers to your questions straight from…

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"In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time." -Richard K. Morgan
It’s absolutely true that, in quantum mechanics, there are certain pairs of properties that we simply can’t measure simultaneously. Measure the position of an object really well, and its momentum becomes more…

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself…

Blurring, chopping and blocking. Three online items this week all deal with some pretty dynamic phenomena.
The blurring is in our perceptions. It turns out that if you even think you have lost money in an experiment, your ability to distinguish between musical notes will be hampered. What’s the connection? Dr. Rony Paz has been showing that this tendency to lump sounds together is tied to fear.…